Shake the Pillars of Heaven

One of my favorite lines in the movie, Big Trouble, from Little China, is when Jack Burton, Kurt Russell's character, turns to his friend at the very end of the movie, after they've just accomplished, basically an impossible task against insurmountable Oz, and he turns to him and says, we really shook the pillars of heaven, didn't we Wang?

Now, what I love about that line is, it reminds me of civil plaintiff work.

Now, not every case, most cases are fairly routine, but every once in a while, you get a case that really takes a lot of effort to get past the obstacles, but when you do, it produces incredible rewards for your client.

Shaking the Pillars of Heaven Upclose

I had a case years ago, in which a young man, Michael, now Michael was born with a serious amount of birth defects, he had cystric fibrosis, he had cerebral palsy, he was wheelchair bound, and non-communicative, and was in a group home.

And the group home was transporting Michael to the dayhab, when the driver of the van stopped short, and Michael's wheelchair just straight up toppled over, and he fell and fractured his leg.

Now, an attorney that I had done a lot of work with came to me with the case, and he was looking at the case as a tip as a personal injury motor vehicle case, dealing with the broken leg, and yes, there was some tragedy in Michael's life, so maybe in terms of damages, there was a little bit more damages, but it was a pretty straightforward case.

He asked me to put together an investigation plan, which I typically did for the attorneys that I worked for.

And one of the things that we dealt with in that was putting together, you know, reviewing documents, and then putting together a list of witnesses to locating contacts, and also public records to get a hold of government records to get a hold of, and then what types of photos we would need and all of that kind of stuff.

At 1st it seemed fairly routine.

But then as I started to go through the case, and the documents that were provided, and that was from the group home and from the day have, I realized that there were multiple circumstances.

In fact, there were more than 10 times where Michael was transported from the group home to his dayhab either without an oxygen model, with a malfunctioning oxygen tank, or with no oxygen tank at all.

And Michael needed to be on oxygen, so that by the time he got to the day have, he was actually cyanotic, and the day have, had to call 911, and have an ambulance come, and transport Michael.

Now, this wasn't getting reported to his family by the dayhab.

And so as I put this together, I started making a list of these different things, and then I noticed other things that the day that the group home was not doing.

And I, so now I had a list of all types of things that we could try to verify, that also the names of the different potential witnesses, and people identified at the day have who had called 911 or whose notes also reflected what was going on, as well as from the group home.

Now, of course, with the group home, we could only contact those that were line employees, no supervisors or managers, but we could contact them directly.

We did not need a subpoena and depose them.

And some of these employees, because turnover is pretty high at group home.

We're now no longer working there.

And I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking disgruntled ex-employee, or at least that's how defense is gonna portray them.

But still, these were people that we could locate and then interview.

Now, I bring this up because most people get into civil plaintiff work because they want to help people.

Hi, my name is Mike Corwin, and I spent 30 years preparing cases for civil plaintiff attorneys, doing conducting case investigations for them.

I now help civil plaintiff law firms develop and implement an effective in-house investigation program so that you and your staff can do what I used to do.

Now, if you're interested, I've got a workshop coming up, you can find information about what we cover about creating and implementing an in-house investigation program that will help you to maximize your clients' recoveries as well as your firm's revenue on my website at www.mikecorwin.com.

Now once I had the names of these people from the investigation plan that I put together.

And once the attorney got through the process of, hold on a sec, this was supposed to be just a regular routine auto case, and now all of a sudden we're looking at a potential failure to care case.

I got to work.

I went out, I interviewed witnesses.

I got public records from the Department of Health who oversaw the regulatory functions for the group home.

I got more documents from the dayhab interviewed some dayhab employees as well.

And we really put together a case that was much further beyond what the initial interpretation based upon the initial assessment by the attorney of what the case looked like.

And that's what I mean by shaking the pillars of heaven.

In the end, what looked like, you know, a broken leg case became a $900,000 failure to care case, and we got that through mediation.

We did not have to go far down the process.

We didn't even go into depositions.

We never got that far because this information was so powerful.

Now, for Michael, who had, you know, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis and all this other stuff, he couldn't really comprehend what we did for him, but for his mom, She really, really grasped this.

And his mom was a great client from my perspective.

Some attorneys might not have found her a great client because she was very demanding, and she was constantly contacting the law firm, asking questions, going along, but for her to know that her son had funds for care was just an incredible feeling for her.

Now, not every case will turn out like that, but you know, most lawyers are aware that there's an expression that there's two types of cases.

Those that get better and those that get worse.

Benefits of an effective in-house investigation system

When you have an in-house investigation process in place, you can conduct some preliminary investigation and decide whether to even take a case or not, so that you don't go down the rabbit hole of spending good money after bad, on a case that's not gonna pan out, or not even cover the cost that you have, so that you're really not gonna benefit your client.

On the other hand, when you have an effective investigation process, you may uncover information that really expands your ability to maximize your client's recoveries and your firm's revenue, since you work on a commission, basically, a percentage.

Now, there's a couple difficulties that you face when it comes to developing an effective in-house investigation process.

One, lawyers are not taught how to investigate, right?

When you go to law school, you learn how to take a given set of facts and apply them to the law, but you aren't taught how to develop those facts.

Having an effective in-house investigation process means adapting to that process, learning how to do that, what the tools of investigation are, which of your staff members will be best suited to do each different task.

I know you're also probably thinking about witness interviews.

Oftentimes the easiest thing to do is just prepare a deposition list, notify the defense that you want to do these depositions, and then take the depositions.

But there's a couple of issues with that.

And in fact, depositions should really be used for as little as possible when that is feasible.

Because of the fact that, one, you're letting defense counsel know everything that you know, which is not great because you're not able to control the use of the information.

And also, it's very expensive.

Depositions cost a lot of money.

You've got to get a court reporter, you may need a videographer.

You've got to pay witness fees, all of those different things add up.

Plus there's your time.

And then finally, Most plaintiff attorneys have done depositions where the defense counsel objects to every other question, even though there's really not a foundation for the objection, but they're doing it because they know if they can interrupt the flow of the interview of the deponent, that it's not gonna be a very productive deposition.

So when you do your own witness interviews, you can get much better information, you can also use the interview process, not to ask questions that you already know the answer to, but to ask questions that you don't actually know the answer to, so that you can make better decisions, because information is a tool to help you make decisions.

So you are freer to ask those difficult questions.

You may decide not to use the witness.

You may decide even that the case is not worth pursuing, or that the value of the case changes, but you can do all of that and control when you release that information.

Now I know you're thinking at this point.

But hold on a second.

If I interview a witness, and that witness then changes his testimony, I have to face a choice, either not use that witness, or if I need to impeach that witness, then I have to stop being counsel, because now I'm a witness because I need to impeach this person.

But let me see if I can assuage some fears on that.

In the 30 years that I conducted witness interviews, approximately 12,000 of them, I only had to take the stand once in order to impeach a witness, and we started by using my interview summary, had the witness read it, and then I did take the stand, and the judge asked me questions.

That's it.

That's the only time in 30 years that I had to take the stand in order to impeach a witness.

So it's really not that common.

And yes, if you have a hinky witness, let's call it, then maybe that's when you want to contract that out to an investigator.

But most of the time, you can handle this stuff in-house.

Anyway, I've got a great workshop coming up It's hands-on.

You're going to be able to go through the process of what it takes to set up an effective in-house investigation system that will maximize your client recoveries and your firm's revenue.